Double shot

That's right, two posts in one night. Can you handle it? Good.

I recently finished re-reading Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters which, along with Franny & Zooey, are my favorite works of his. Salinger, of course, caught the literary world's attention with A Catcher in the Rye, a book that had an edge. These other two works, though, don't. There is some rising action in F&Z and there is certainly some tension in Carpenters, but nothing like the edge of Catcher.

While this blog primarily exists to shame myself into writing, it is also a place where I consider the practice of writing. To this end, I highly respect Salinger in F&Z and Carpenters especially, because he writes with a handicap. He refuses to play to the readers' baser desires. Sex. Violence. Explosions. Aliens/Vampires. Not here. If there's a cop, it's because a character needs to know how much longer a parade is going to hold up traffic. Amen.

By today's standards, I doubt he could have started his career with anything but Catcher. It grabbed peoples' attention and built him a following. After that, he slyly worked Eastern philosophy and detachment into Western literature, moving away from Holden Caulfield to Seymour Glass.

Neither of my first two books eschew edge. I'm not at the point where I can do that. I do, though, look forward to that book.

Does size matter?

In Billy Collins' poem, "Workshop" he writes:

"In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here
is really two poems, or three, or four,
or possibly none."

I finished a rough draft of Chapter Three yesterday. In the third to last paragraph I made a note to self: This is all happening too fast. And so it is. At this pace, the book'll be done in five chapters - maybe 90 pages. While I appreciate an economy of words - especially those that carry heavy if not multiple loads - this chapter feels like someone's just come by in the middle of the night, spilled their guts and then ran off while I sat on the stoop smoking.

Fortunately, I can invite this person in, pour drinks for us both and let the story unwind in more depth through future revisions. Bits that are in this draft will be pushed into subsequent chapters so that this one is tight. Other parts will be expanded. There are squirt guns. Kinda proud of that one.

In the past I've written novellas of 90 and 120 pages. Some of my favorite books (Franny & Zooey, To The Lighthouse) have topped out around 200 which is where I'd like to be. I'd also like to be 6' tall, but that ain't gonna happen. It'll end where it will end; if I force it to be a specific length quality will suffer.

As in the past, writing's been therapeutic. A number of things I've written in the past have also foreshadowed future personal events, but I reckon it may be years before this batch bears that kind of fruit.

Good night. Good morning.